Asterisk Voip Gateway

Asterisk supports many different communications protocols from both the modern world of VoIP and from the legacy PSTN. This makes it a powerful tool for building gateways and protocol converters.

Below is a recipe for building a VoIP-to-PSTN gateway using Asterisk, an analog or digital telephony interface card and a standard PC server. The steps are as follows:

1. Select your telephony interface hardware.
2. Select your computer hardware.
3. Install Asterisk
4. Configure your connections
5. Build your gateway dialplan

Asterisk ACD

With Asterisk you can build a powerful ACD for the cost of the server hardware and phones.

Step 1: Select Your Telephony Hardware

Asterisk applications that connect with legacy telephony systems (PBXs or the PSTN) require telephony interface hardware. Small system generally use analog or ISDN BRI connections. Larger systems (more than 12 lines) frequently use T1, E1 or J1 digital connections. If you're new to telephony, check out the Asterisk telephony by clicking the "More" link below.

Step 2: Select Your Computer Hardware

Asterisk can run on virtually any modern computer, but when building a production telephony application server you should follow a few basic best-practice guidelines. Click the "More" link below to learn the basic requirements for a solid Asterisk server.

Step 3: Install Linux & Asterisk

Once you have your Asterisk hardware the next step is software. You will either need to install Linux or use a ready-to-run distribution to install Linux, Asterisk and various related software packages. Since these application tutorials are intended to help you create custom telephony applications we will start with a generic installation of CentOS 5.3 and then install Asterisk from the Yum repository. This make it relatively easy to keep Asterisk up to date and avoids the complexities of hand compiling the Asterisk source code.

Step 4: Configure Connections

Now that Asterisk is installed and running you need to edit the system configuration files to implement connections to VoIP and PSTN services. Since this step is common to all applications (Asterisk doesn't do much good if it is not connected to anything) it contains information on creating both service connections (connections to VoIP or PSTN services) and endpoint connections (connections to phones or terminal adapters). Some applications require both service and endpoint connections (PBX, ACD) while others may require only service connections.

Asterisk 10.6.1 Now Available

The Asterisk Development Team has announced the release of Asterisk 10.6.1.
This release is available for immediate download at
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk
The release of Asterisk 10.6.1 resolves an issue reported by the
community and would have not been possible without your participation.
Thank you!
The following is the issue resolved in this release:

• --- Remove a superfluous and dangerous freeing of an SSL_CTX.
  (Closes issue ASTERISK-20074. Reported by Trevor Helmsley)

For a full list of changes in this release, please see the ChangeLog:
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-10.6.1
Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!

Asterisk 1.8.14.1 Now Available

The Asterisk Development Team has announced the release of Asterisk 1.8.14.1.
This release is available for immediate download at
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk
The release of Asterisk 1.8.14.1 resolves an issue reported by the
community and would have not been possible without your participation.
Thank you!
The following is the issue resolved in this release:

• --- Remove a superfluous and dangerous freeing of an SSL_CTX.
  (Closes issue ASTERISK-20074. Reported by Trevor Helmsley)

For a full list of changes in this release, please see the ChangeLog:
http://downloads.asterisk.org/pub/telephony/asterisk/ChangeLog-1.8.14.1
Thank you for your continued support of Asterisk!